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Post by smashlord on Sept 10, 2022 17:39:38 GMT -6
Has anyone used drum triggers with much success? If so, are they fairly accurate or prone to sympathetic vibrations? Any particular ones anyone recommends?
A fair amount of my mix prep time is often spent going through MIDI points (generated with Massey DRT) and making sure there are no mis-triggers and aligning them to the recorded drums, if so. This can be extremely time consuming with drummers that bash the hats but barely hit the snare, so I am wondering if simultaneously capturing a trigger might cut down on the editing time.
I have a metal record coming up with loads of double kick and I am just loathing the thought of potentially spending hours upon hours editing MIDI trigger points.
Thanks in advance!
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Post by thirdeye on Sept 10, 2022 22:22:55 GMT -6
I have some ddrum triggers that I'll use for metal bands sometimes, running the ddrum trigger signal into a mic preamp and recording into Pro Tools. They have been very accurate and not prone to sympathetic vibrations. Especially useful for blast beats with softer kick and snare hits. They can be a lifesaver for cutting out bleed and using Massey DRT. Quite often I can run Slate Trigger 2 directly off the ddrum trigger track and not even have to use DRT. I usually just trigger off the audio and not the generated midi.
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Post by bgrotto on Sept 11, 2022 10:43:12 GMT -6
I find DRT to be waaaaaaay faster to dial in than real, physical triggers. You'll still need to go through and double-check sample alignment anyhow, so you may as well skip the drum triggers.
For the double kick album you got coming up, try ditching the real kick altogether. Use a kick pad and a e-drumkit brain to capture the basic performance, then nuke the whole thing and replace it with midi notes. You'll have a way easier time gridding the rest of the kit, and the kick editing will be a breeze.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2022 12:00:44 GMT -6
1. Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2. Sound Radix Drum Leveler 3. Cubase 12
Are all unmatched for soulless robot metal. You don’t even need to pay attention to what the first two sound like for your plastic drums. Just push the sliders and compression knob up and then extract midi. Do your plastic drums in Cubase 12. Cubase 12 has phase accurate group warping. Your other daws don’t. Just bounce them out and import them into whatever you want to mix in when you’re done. Don’t waste your own time and life.
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Post by bgrotto on Sept 11, 2022 12:09:15 GMT -6
1. Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2. Sound Radix Drum Leveler 3. Cubase 12 Are all unmatched for soulless robot metal. You don’t even need to pay attention to what the first two sound like for your plastic drums. Just push the sliders and compression knob up and then audio to midi, extract midi, Trigger, or whether. Do your plastic drums in Cubase 12. I don’t care what daw you use or believe to be better or more professional. Cubase 12 has phase accurate group warping. Just bounce them out and import them into whatever you want when you’re done. Don’t waste your own time and life. There's no such thing as phase accurate group warping, at least not yet. I've tried them all, and I've found problems with all of them. Elastic Audio in PT is certainly amongst the worst, but none of them are perfect. If you want truly phase accurate drum editing, you gotta slice and move, a la Beat Detective. Also, and this is critically important, ESPECIALLY for double kick metal, at least 50% of the drum editing job is tracking down flams between hands and feet, and left hand and right hand. Time stretching -- even when it eventually reaches that mythical true phase accuracy -- will not only not address this, it will cause additional headache and slop. As for Oxford Gate's MIDI extract: it's good, but not nearly as good as DRT. Not even close. The only DRT competitor I've found is the MIDI extract in Superior Drummer 3. I actually think SD 3's is better, but it's a more cumbersome workflow (esp for those of us who've been using DRT for a million years). Last, but certainly not least: drum levelers simply don't work in metal. I mean...they'll turn your drummer's wimpy hits up, but it'll still just sound like a wimpy hit, except louder. Drums get brighter when hit harder. They compress a bit. Etc. Turning them up just highlights their wimpiness, not to mention it introduces all sorts of bleed issues. Look, I get that robot metal is ripe for criticism, and I am certainly prone to criticizing it. But it's really really highly specialized work, and if you don't know the ins and outs, I respectfully submit that you're going to inadvertently dole out some really bad/unhelpful advice.
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Post by smashlord on Sept 11, 2022 12:39:41 GMT -6
I find DRT to be waaaaaaay faster to dial in than real, physical triggers. You'll still need to go through and double-check sample alignment anyhow, so you may as well skip the drum triggers. For the double kick album you got coming up, try ditching the real kick altogether. Use a kick pad and a e-drumkit brain to capture the basic performance, then nuke the whole thing and replace it with midi notes. You'll have a way easier time gridding the rest of the kit, and the kick editing will be a breeze. You pretty much answered my question, thank you! I was looking for a short cut, but alas! Great idea on the kick pad. I am going to Europe to do the tracking and thus have to travel light, so I wonder if one is not available I can improvise a pad with a trigger/contact mic and some relatively quiet surface!
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Post by bgrotto on Sept 11, 2022 12:54:55 GMT -6
I find DRT to be waaaaaaay faster to dial in than real, physical triggers. You'll still need to go through and double-check sample alignment anyhow, so you may as well skip the drum triggers. For the double kick album you got coming up, try ditching the real kick altogether. Use a kick pad and a e-drumkit brain to capture the basic performance, then nuke the whole thing and replace it with midi notes. You'll have a way easier time gridding the rest of the kit, and the kick editing will be a breeze. You pretty much answered my question, thank you! I was looking for a short cut, but alas! Great idea on the kick pad. I am going to Europe to do the tracking and thus have to travel light, so I wonder if one is not available I can improvise a pad with a trigger/contact mic and some relatively quiet surface! I'd definitely try to find a good pad, or better yet, see if the drummer you're recording has a set of e-drums he or she uses and can bring their own pad. Drummers can be really sensitive to the pad they use, esp with the double kick stuff; if the one you bring doesn't feel like what they're used to, it'll be a major slog on the whole session.
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Post by smashlord on Sept 11, 2022 13:05:46 GMT -6
You pretty much answered my question, thank you! I was looking for a short cut, but alas! Great idea on the kick pad. I am going to Europe to do the tracking and thus have to travel light, so I wonder if one is not available I can improvise a pad with a trigger/contact mic and some relatively quiet surface! I'd definitely try to find a good pad, or better yet, see if the drummer you're recording has a set of e-drums he or she uses and can bring their own pad. Drummers can be really sensitive to the pad they use, esp with the double kick stuff; if the one you bring doesn't feel like what they're used to, it'll be a major slog on the whole session. Turns out the drummer actually does, as does the vocalist! Seems like it will work out. Thanks again for the suggestion!
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Post by bgrotto on Sept 11, 2022 13:13:59 GMT -6
I'd definitely try to find a good pad, or better yet, see if the drummer you're recording has a set of e-drums he or she uses and can bring their own pad. Drummers can be really sensitive to the pad they use, esp with the double kick stuff; if the one you bring doesn't feel like what they're used to, it'll be a major slog on the whole session. Turns out the drummer actually does, as does the vocalist! Seems like it will work out. Thanks again for the suggestion! Excellent! That's going to be massively helpful. Happy tracking!
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Post by phdamage on Sept 11, 2022 18:28:21 GMT -6
Ddrum triggers don’t even need a mic pre. You’ll prob clip your converter anyway on loud hits but who cares? Save your pres for mics!
I did track a couple bands recently who used footblasters on their kick pedals (only for kick drums). They mount right on the pedal (not something you can swap easily) - they are way more accurate!
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Post by thirdeye on Sept 12, 2022 7:22:19 GMT -6
Ddrum triggers don’t even need a mic pre. You’ll prob clip your converter anyway on loud hits but who cares? Save your pres for mics! I did track a couple bands recently who used footblasters on their kick pedals (only for kick drums). They mount right on the pedal (not something you can swap easily) - they are way more accurate! The footblaster looks pretty cool. May have to pick a couple up.
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Post by schmalzy on Sept 12, 2022 21:28:25 GMT -6
I've used triggers a few times in the past. It's more of a pain than I liked and it ate up some of my inputs. If I had a bad-sounding room and/or didn't want the natural sound, I'd do 'em. More often then not, though, I want a range of room mics from my pretty good sounding room AND I want to retain the natural drums. I find the DDrum triggers a hair more easy to work with than the audio when it's REALLY fast and I intentionally make the drums really dead...but that's about it.
The kickpad thing is the right way to go for "I know we're going to replace this kick" stuff. Some guys can't hang with the feel of 'em, though. So what they'll do - often the tech death or grindcore guys - is tune a kick to a tension that rebounds well, STUFF it with blankets/pillows to deaden it as much as possible, and put a 57 right next to where the beater hits on the batter side near the beaters themselves. That way its shortening up the kicks as much as possible, throwing no low frequencies into the room mics, rebounding well to get out of the way for the next hit, and getting as cleanly isolated a tik as possible into the DAW.
For toms, I always cut 'em by hand. I can see where the stick hit is, so I just go through and cut the bleed on each one by hand. If you're going to sample replace/augment those then you can use the cut points to help you define where the trigger hits go. Just shorten the length of each audio item/region/whatever your DAW calls it to something like 40ms. My DAW Reaper makes that really easy. Trigger will love to see it and you'll get something pretty accurate. Definitely pay attention to the length of the ring if you're going into the recording knowing you're going to be sample replacing. You'll be much happier about hand-cutting tom hits if the ring is shorter.
For snares, I just resign to the fact that I'll probably have to automate Trigger a lot to make it happy. Reaper has a pre-fx volume envelope that can be automated plus I can automate the detail, retrigger, and sensitivity parameters in Trigger. For stuff like ghost notes, I'll cut 'em by hand and drop them to a second snare trigger track so I can set up for those in more detail.
It's all pretty labor heavy, this aggressive music thing. But it's a labor of love from my perspective!
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Post by BenjaminAshlin on Sept 13, 2022 0:50:22 GMT -6
1. Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2. Sound Radix Drum Leveler 3. Cubase 12 Are all unmatched for soulless robot metal. You don’t even need to pay attention to what the first two sound like for your plastic drums. Just push the sliders and compression knob up and then audio to midi, extract midi, Trigger, or whether. Do your plastic drums in Cubase 12. I don’t care what daw you use or believe to be better or more professional. Cubase 12 has phase accurate group warping. Just bounce them out and import them into whatever you want when you’re done. Don’t waste your own time and life. There's no such thing as phase accurate group warping, at least not yet. I've tried them all, and I've found problems with all of them. Elastic Audio in PT is certainly amongst the worst, but none of them are perfect. If you want truly phase accurate drum editing, you gotta slice and move, a la Beat Detective. Also, and this is critically important, ESPECIALLY for double kick metal, at least 50% of the drum editing job is tracking down flams between hands and feet, and left hand and right hand. Time stretching -- even when it eventually reaches that mythical true phase accuracy -- will not only not address this, it will cause additional headache and slop. As for Oxford Gate's MIDI extract: it's good, but not nearly as good as DRT. Not even close. The only DRT competitor I've found is the MIDI extract in Superior Drummer 3. I actually think SD 3's is better, but it's a more cumbersome workflow (esp for those of us who've been using DRT for a million years). Last, but certainly not least: drum levelers simply don't work in metal. I mean...they'll turn your drummer's wimpy hits up, but it'll still just sound like a wimpy hit, except louder. Drums get brighter when hit harder. They compress a bit. Etc. Turning them up just highlights their wimpiness, not to mention it introduces all sorts of bleed issues. Look, I get that robot metal is ripe for criticism, and I am certainly prone to criticizing it. But it's really really highly specialized work, and if you don't know the ins and outs, I respectfully submit that you're going to inadvertently dole out some really bad/unhelpful advice. I have a feeling Dan knows a thing or two about producing metal...... Cubase is very accurate for Audio -> Midi. The slip editing in Cubase is the best way to edit metal drums for that on the grid robot sound. The latest quantize works pretty well too. A lot better than that terrible BD workflow. I have a full set of Ddrum triggers, but only trigger the snare and have an electronic kick pad going straight into a preamp. A kick pad like the KD-10 is pretty common place when recording metal drums. Its hard to get a tight mix with all that double kick in the rooms and OH.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 13, 2022 3:46:33 GMT -6
1. Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2. Sound Radix Drum Leveler 3. Cubase 12 Are all unmatched for soulless robot metal. You don’t even need to pay attention to what the first two sound like for your plastic drums. Just push the sliders and compression knob up and then audio to midi, extract midi, Trigger, or whether. Do your plastic drums in Cubase 12. I don’t care what daw you use or believe to be better or more professional. Cubase 12 has phase accurate group warping. Just bounce them out and import them into whatever you want when you’re done. Don’t waste your own time and life. There's no such thing as phase accurate group warping, at least not yet. I've tried them all, and I've found problems with all of them. Elastic Audio in PT is certainly amongst the worst, but none of them are perfect. If you want truly phase accurate drum editing, you gotta slice and move, a la Beat Detective. Also, and this is critically important, ESPECIALLY for double kick metal, at least 50% of the drum editing job is tracking down flams between hands and feet, and left hand and right hand. Time stretching -- even when it eventually reaches that mythical true phase accuracy -- will not only not address this, it will cause additional headache and slop. As for Oxford Gate's MIDI extract: it's good, but not nearly as good as DRT. Not even close. The only DRT competitor I've found is the MIDI extract in Superior Drummer 3. I actually think SD 3's is better, but it's a more cumbersome workflow (esp for those of us who've been using DRT for a million years). Last, but certainly not least: drum levelers simply don't work in metal. I mean...they'll turn your drummer's wimpy hits up, but it'll still just sound like a wimpy hit, except louder. Drums get brighter when hit harder. They compress a bit. Etc. Turning them up just highlights their wimpiness, not to mention it introduces all sorts of bleed issues. Look, I get that robot metal is ripe for criticism, and I am certainly prone to criticizing it. But it's really really highly specialized work, and if you don't know the ins and outs, I respectfully submit that you're going to inadvertently dole out some really bad/unhelpful advice. What??? You still chop it up in Cubase 12. Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate and Sound Radix Drum Leveler hasten the conversion to midi and enable the preservation of more of the performance. Drum Leveler is great for real recordings of good drummers too and prevents Bam Bam Flintstones drums.
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Post by christophert on Sept 13, 2022 3:52:25 GMT -6
DRT
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hoot
Full Member
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Post by hoot on Sept 13, 2022 7:03:49 GMT -6
The Sound Radix Drum Levelor is a GODSEND for this! It’s not a standard dynamic processor as someone above eluded to. It identifies the hit you are trying to layer as an individual sample itself and can isolate it.
Using this to chop around the hit being sent for triggering allows you to accurately layer pretty much anything in your kit even if all you have is an OH capture… I’ve done it… it’s insane…
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Post by bgrotto on Sept 13, 2022 7:49:55 GMT -6
There's no such thing as phase accurate group warping, at least not yet. I've tried them all, and I've found problems with all of them. Elastic Audio in PT is certainly amongst the worst, but none of them are perfect. If you want truly phase accurate drum editing, you gotta slice and move, a la Beat Detective. Also, and this is critically important, ESPECIALLY for double kick metal, at least 50% of the drum editing job is tracking down flams between hands and feet, and left hand and right hand. Time stretching -- even when it eventually reaches that mythical true phase accuracy -- will not only not address this, it will cause additional headache and slop. As for Oxford Gate's MIDI extract: it's good, but not nearly as good as DRT. Not even close. The only DRT competitor I've found is the MIDI extract in Superior Drummer 3. I actually think SD 3's is better, but it's a more cumbersome workflow (esp for those of us who've been using DRT for a million years). Last, but certainly not least: drum levelers simply don't work in metal. I mean...they'll turn your drummer's wimpy hits up, but it'll still just sound like a wimpy hit, except louder. Drums get brighter when hit harder. They compress a bit. Etc. Turning them up just highlights their wimpiness, not to mention it introduces all sorts of bleed issues. Look, I get that robot metal is ripe for criticism, and I am certainly prone to criticizing it. But it's really really highly specialized work, and if you don't know the ins and outs, I respectfully submit that you're going to inadvertently dole out some really bad/unhelpful advice. What??? You still chop it up in Cubase 12. Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate and Sound Radix Drum Leveler hasten the conversion to midi and enable the preservation of more of the performance. Drum Leveler is great for real recordings of good drummers too and prevents Bam Bam Flintstones drums. My apologies, it seems I misunderstood you. I thought by 'warping' you meant time stretching. Sorry bout that!
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 13, 2022 14:29:29 GMT -6
What??? You still chop it up in Cubase 12. Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate and Sound Radix Drum Leveler hasten the conversion to midi and enable the preservation of more of the performance. Drum Leveler is great for real recordings of good drummers too and prevents Bam Bam Flintstones drums. My apologies, it seems I misunderstood you. I thought by 'warping' you meant time stretching. Sorry bout that! I think everything in Cubase is technically warping and before 12 it didn’t let you quantized a bunch of tracks at once. Now it does when you perform surgery on the overheads
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